I picked up my Surface RT on launch day last year as I happened to be in New York for work. The strong yen made it a bargain and I’ve been living with it since. Because it won’t run most desktop apps, it has seen limited use. It was an excellent video player during flights, but nothing an iPad could not have handled. Word made a passing replacement for Windows Live Writer with it’s built in blogging system, but it wasn’t perfect.

A promising slide from TechEd 2012 promises VPN support for Cisco VPNs: And from here: The TechEd 2012 session “Windows 8: Windows RT Devices for Business” (http://channel9.msdn.com/ Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/WCL202) stated at the 26 min mark that Microsoft incorporate the Cisco VPN client into Windows RT out of the box. It doesn’t work for most Cisco VPN setups where the IT department has decided to use PSK authentication. Windows never natively supported the IPSec Identifier, or “Group Name” feature in Cisco VPNs, which I argue would be the vast majority of real use cases.

The CapsLock key is rubbish. Remapping it to Control is easy on OS X and the Happy Hacker keyboard I use on my desktops doesn’t even have one. On standard Windows you can run a key remapping program but WinRT is locked down (for now). Here is an easy way to map Caps Lock to Control. First, hit the Windows key and type “Powershell”. Right click on the Powershell icon. You will see some options appear at the bottom of the screen – click “Run as Administrator.

On the Surface’s Windows RT, you cannot install alternative browsers. This means no AdBlock. There is a workaround to this, using IE10’s “Tracking Protection”. First, fire up desktop IE10, click the little gear in the top right and select Safety -> Tracking Protection. Click on “Get a Tracking Protection List online…”. You should see a list of tracking protection lists on Microsoft’s site. You will want to click Add next to the Easylist lists.